No More “Conversations”

For all the trendy buzzwords the games journalism cabal enjoys repeating in a never-ending, desperate attempt to establish the Heisenberg-like purity of its high-minded progressivism, there is one which has risen to be a sort of warning bell for those who would rather not grant the frauds the satisfaction of their audience: Conversation.

Simply put, any time a writer in the field of games journalism labels an article, event, or happening as a conversation, it is 99.9% certain one can safely ignore whatever the clod has to say without being any worse off for it. Though ludonarrative dissonance (a term invented out of whole cloth to make the cabal feel more like proper academics) has recently come into vogue when the frauds write lengthy missives only other frauds will bother to slog through, conversation is a word the frauds tend to use when writing for the rubes who keep them employed at their various clickbait mills.

The reason for this development is that labeling something as a conversation makes the fraud feel as if he or she is engaged in something higher-minded than mere games writing. Anyone can write an article about a video game, but conversation? That’s something a leader has with society. This nuance is essential, as it is a hallmark of the fraud to be horrified at the idea that his or her life’s work boils down to coverage of electronic playthings, the finest of which tend to run counter to every thread of overly idealistic far-left philosophy which makes up the fraud’s political worldview.

The frauds are horrified at the idea their life’s work boils down to coverage of electronic playthings at odds with their idealistic worldview.

Consider that the modern face of the games press is a college-educated twenty or thirtysomething working in what is, ostensibly, journalism. If they aspire to certain heights of the field, they most likely work out of one major costal hub or another, as this is where the major players in the sector are located. It is no wonder, then, that these people feel not only a right, but a responsibility, to dutifully and frequently complain about military shooters, about boobplate armor, about each and every time someone is called a name over Xbox Live, about this thing and that thing and all the others.

When the frauds claim video games as some sort of social justice battleground, it can be tempting to dismiss their hyperbole as mere clickbaiting. After all, the entire field is awash in it, and nothing harvests sweet advertising dollars in game/tech journalism quite like trolling one’s own audience. Still, we must not attribute to dull, simple greed what is more accurately explained by zealotry — the frauds believe their own hype. To the fraud, everything comes down to social (in)justice. The frauds are essentially in the same class of individuals who watched The Matrix and thought it was real — simply substitute deplorable white male nerds for sentinels and agents. And of course, in this analogy, each and every last one of the frauds believes him or herself to be in the Keanu Reeves role, burdened with the duty to confront those awful gamers with the insight they have gleaned from elective courses in the humanities and untold visits to any number of poorly written blogs and Tumblrs.

The fraud sees everything in shades of social justice. Even video games are part of the conspiracy. They’re like people who thought The Matrix was real.

So it is that when the frauds show to the party, they come not to enjoy it, but to kill the buzz. When those of us who both understand and enjoy the medium aggressively defend it (as we must), the fraud will feign shock, throw up his or her metaphorical hands, and protest, “woah, man, chill out, I’m just trying to have a ~conversation~ is all.”

When a fraud is prompted to have a conversation, in a publicly viewable space, it usually means the fraud has already made up his or her mind on the subject. What’s more, the fraud is not above shutting down actual conversation in the service of furthering his or her agenda. When sex-negative feminist Anita Sarkeesian scraped up a haul the size of a doctor’s yearly salary to complain about video games on YouTube, she had no problem shutting down the comments.Yes, Anita was subject to some considerable volume of psychotic, nigh-unintelligible hate mail and impotent threats from trolls in cyberspace, but so what? When one begins a conversation under the hostile, dismissive premise of deigning an entire medium and its fans as being roughly on par with Reddit Men’s Rights Advocates and Creepshot posters, one might reasonably expect a bit of heat.

A conversation implies a certain level of back and forth, of give and take. The fraud has no intent of giving anything. Conversations started by the frauds have no scholarly intent or worth, at least not in the empirical science sense of the word. That is to say, when a fraud comes to the soapbox, he or she has already made up his or her mind on the topic.

When the frauds start a “conversation,” they mean to kill the buzz.

The conversation, then, reeks of confirmation bias. The fraud will selectively choose those tidbits which support the predetermined conclusion, while ignoring – or outright deriding – those which do not. One example of this is the common misconception, freely tossed around like so much fecal matter among wild animals, that half of all gamers are women. In any discussion on the topic of triple-A video games where a poster dares to suggest that video games catering to men is the simple market-based result of decades of indifference and/or outright hostility toward the medium on the part of the fairer sex; the social justice brigade, white knights, and all flavors of other assorted Tiny Toons will come out of the sludge to shout that half of all gamers are women. They will, like clockwork, fail to recognize or acknowledge that the oft-cited statistic is only true if we make the fatal error of lumping $60 triple-A blockbusters in with free-to-play Facebook titles and cheap, disposable mobile fare. The “explosion” in so-called “female gamers” comes not from more and more women discovering and embracing the medium at its highest levels. It comes from the emergence of an entirely new market that is completely separate from traditional triple-A video games, in the same way that the dollar menu at McDonalds does not impact the bottom line or culinary direction of the world’s best restaurants.

Naturally, this does not fit the predefined narrative put forth by the frauds, and as such, the “half of all gamers” statistic is offered without any qualification or disclaimer. This failure to disclose is indicative of a larger issue: Though ostensibly desiring to be engaged in conversation, rare is the fraud who will allow him or herself to be subjected to a true exchange of ideas with a person who challenges the very premise of his or her argument, regardless of how well-researched that challenge might be. 99 times out of 100, the fraud will simply delete comments or ban dissidents, all while a gaggle of sycophants fellate the moderator for maintaining a safe space.

The fraud is not above shutting down actual conversation in order to further an agenda.

Indeed, in those final two words, we come to the meat and potatoes of the fraud’s desire for conversation, the true endgame of his/her agenda. To the fraud, the creation of a “safe space” within gaming means that the ideals of tolerance, inclusion, and acceptance must take precedence over all else. Never you mind that “don’t offend anyone” has never been a recipe for great art. Let’s ignore that it has never been easier or cheaper to develop and release video games/interactive software, and pay no heed to the fact that that there have never been more games/”games” on more platforms in the history of the medium.

Disregard all of that, ye good and faithful Social Justice Warriors! “Accentuate the negative” has always been the mandate for a select group of professional victims with soapboxes, and so it is the frauds prefer to ignore the medium’s present variety to dwell and focus on a few dozen of the industry’s top-shelf, cutting-edge products that continue to cater to the audience that financially justifies their existence. Remember this, the next time some self-appointed culture warrior chooses to solicit a conversation. Surely, your most justified response shall be, “no talk.“

2 comments

I’m surprised no one has commented on this article yet. It was an entertaining read.

Nicely put on the observation that mobile gaming is a separate market from the AAA scene, and I hope more out there start factoring that in. But that’s probably hoping for too much right now. Too much infighting through clickbait articles, next-gen consoles and Diablo III.

Thank you for reading. My problem is less that casual/mobile exists, and more with the fact that the games press insists on driving this inane narrative that all games are equal, and that if you play Candy Crush exclusively, you’re just as much a gamer as the dude with an encyclopedia of knowledge on the medium going back to the 80s.

They do it because it helps drive their dream of gaming being “mainstream,” or whatever the fuck. You see these people regularly discuss how games need to “mature” or whatever, and yet, I can’t think of anything less mature than being concerned with what someone else thinks about some silly thing you do to pass the time.